Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee-Chapter 74: Bounced Check

Something is wrong.

I feel it before I can name it—a low, itching wrongness settling behind my sternum like a massive gulp of water stretching my throat.

The light tunnel behind us is already gone, swallowed by darkness. Through the oval windows, the bioluminescent biome bleeds back into view—the floating rock formations, the upward waterfalls, the pale blue glow of everything alive again.

We’re too slow.

I check my HUD. Then the window. Then the HUD again.

A transit system built underneath a Leviathan biome doesn’t meander. It doesn’t sightsee. The second those beads hit the slot, this thing should have punched through to the other side in under a minute—the kind of speed that compresses your organs against your spine and makes conversation physically impossible.

Instead, we’re cruising.

Like a Sunday drive.

That’s not right.

I press my palm flat against the cold glass and lean forward, scanning the terrain outside. The rails emerge from the mountain behind us, curve through a shallow valley of glitching flora.

And then a sharp, aggressive bend cutting directly into the face of another mountain. The tunnel mouth looks like a dark circle in the rock, one thousand feet ahead, maybe less.

My eyes travel upward. A blue light pulses on the ridge above the tunnel entrance.

Then I see what’s making it.

The same titanic Leviathan in a way that breaks the brain’s ability to process scale correctly. It isn’t a creature perched on a mountain.

It is like another mountain, and the mountain happens to have a face.

Its open palm is raised toward us, fingers spread, and arms fully extended. Gathered in the center of that palm is a sphere of compressed energy that pulses with a deep, sick blue light.

The sphere is growing.

I run the math in three seconds flat. Distance, velocity, charge accumulation rate, the approximate yield of a Leviathan-class energy discharge against a reinforced transit hull.

Twelve seconds.

The train leaving is a violation of this biome system—an unpaid debt, an escaped meal, a broken rule. And now the thing that owns this biome is correcting the error the only way it knows how.

We aren’t passengers.

We’re a bounced check. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

I look at the group.

Oliver is white. Not pale—white.

The specific color of a man whose body has already started dying before his brain gives it permission. His mouth is open. He’s trying to say something. I can see the shape of words forming and dissolving before they reach air, his jaw working silently like a beached fish.

The thug beside him has pressed himself flat against the back wall, both hands gripping the luggage rack above with knuckles that have gone completely bloodless.

Rhayne and Lola are at the window.

Side by side. Perfectly still.

Lola’s forehead is touching the glass, her breath fogging a small circle. She’s looking at the Leviathan with the same expression she uses to examine glitching lizards. Not awe. Not terror. Pure, data-gathering stillness.

Rhayne isn’t moving at all. I can’t say if she was even breathing.

The Leviathan’s aura hasn’t reached us yet—we’re at the edge of the effective radius, close enough to feel the pressure like a hand pressing on the top of the skull, but not close enough for it to lock the legs and empty the mind.

Give it ten more seconds and that changes...

I don’t have ten seconds.

"EVERYONE MOVE."

My voice comes out at a volume I didn’t decide to use. "THROUGH THE CARS. NOW. GO."

Nobody argues. Fear is a spectacular motivator when it’s pointed in the right direction.

I shove Oliver toward the front of the car. He stumbles, finds his feet, and runs.

The thug is already moving.

I grab Lola by the back of her jacket and physically carry her two steps before she gets the idea and takes over, legs pumping.

Rhayne breaks from the window and sprints without being told.

The connecting door between cars slams open.

Second car. Third car. The door to the first.

I count heads as they pass through.

Rhayne. Lola. Thug.

Oliver.

The second Oliver’s boot clears the threshold, the world ends.

The blast doesn’t announce itself. There’s no buildup, no theatrical charge-sound, no warning. Just a single instant where light fills every window simultaneously, golden, absolute, and wrong.

Then the three cars behind us simply stop existing.

The shockwave hits the first car like a war hammer.

The whole frame torques sideways, wheels screaming on the rails, the walls flexing inward with a metallic shriek that I feel in my back molars.

I’m airborne before I process the movement. I was launched upward, one hand finding the door frame out of pure animal instinct, the other swiping at empty air.

I’m hanging.

Half inside the car, half out—the tunnel mouth already swallowing us, the rock walls close enough to scrape skin.

The wind velocity at this speed would strip the flesh off my face in about eight seconds. I can feel the aerodynamic drag pulling at my jacket, my legs, trying to peel me off and feed me to the stone blur outside.

I have enough grip to hold.

I don’t have enough grip to climb.

A hand closes around my wrist.

Then another, around my forearm.

Oliver hauls me upward with the kind of strength that only exists in people who you know you can trust for a while. No technique. No finesse. Just raw, desperate pulling. My shoulder screams. My knuckles scrape the door frame.

I come up and over in one ungainly lurch, collapsing onto the car floor.

The door slams shut behind me.

The wind dies.

Silence... or something close to it. Just the rails, and the breathing of five people who are all still alive for reasons that are mostly luck.

Oliver is on his knees, his chest heaving.

I look at him.

"I don’t forget debts," I say.

He lets out a sound that isn’t quite a laugh and isn’t quite a sob. Somewhere in between. He wipes his face with his sleeve and doesn’t respond, because there isn’t anything to say to that.

The train accelerates.

Not the gentle acceleration from before. The violent speed that we experienced during the first trip. The fluorescent strips along the ceiling stutter and die. Emergency orange floods the car in dim, underwater light.

The hull groans.

A sound like a submarine descending.

Through the window the familiar abyss. Once again, the tunnel dissolves into the crushing weight of the open ocean, vast and ink-black, visible only where the external floodlights cut through the void. It is the same cold, silent, deep ocean, happening all over again.

Rhayne pulls Lola close without saying anything.

Lola allows it.

That alone tells me more about what just happened than any words could.

The thug grabs the luggage rack and stares at the ceiling with the expression of a man actively reconsidering every decision that led him here.

I check my HUD.

[OXI: 903/1,600]

Looks like I got some damage.

The lights flicker.

Flicker again.

Then the ocean outside the windows goes dark. Suddenly rock walls replace water, and the train begins to decelerate. Smoothly and Deliberately.

The train stops.

I’m the first one through the door.

The air hits me before anything else does.

Something’s off. Not dangerous, just... wrong. It’s the air. The smell, the temperature, that heavy feeling you only get when a room is packed with too much happening at once. I can feel it with every breath.

My gut reacted before I could even see what was there.

Whatever’s out there, I’ve never encountered anything like it.

My eyes adjust.

I stop walking.

I pull up my HUD. Navigate to positioning. Location data.

[Current Location: ????]

Again...

I look back up.

I have never seen anything like this.

"What in the—"

Behind me, Oliver steps off the train, tries to say something, but goes completely silent mid-breath.

I can’t look away.

There are lights down there. Not bioluminescence. Not OXI glow.

City lights.